Trouble is brewing in Washington as those who still consider legitimate the national healthcare takeover known as Obamacare try to figure out which enrollees are even eligible for coverage. A new report issued by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) admits that nearly 1.3 million Obamacare enrollees, or about 16 percent of the overall total, cannot be verified for legal status in the U.S. – in other words, most, if not all, of them are illegal immigrants rather than American citizens.

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The shocking figures can be found on page 11 of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) report, entitled Marketplaces Faced Early Challenges Resolving Inconsistencies with Applicant Data. According to the figures, 1,295,571 “inconsistencies” – this is a politically correct way of implying missing or fraudulent data – found on Obamacare applications involved issues of citizenship, national status or lawful presence in the U.S., meaning applicants did not or could not verify this important information.

“The Federal marketplace was generally incapable of resolving most inconsistencies,” admits the report, noting that a large percentage of these faulty applications will likely never be resolved, at least not until the eligibility verification system becomes operable. “Without the ability to resolve inconsistencies in an applicant’s eligibility data, the marketplace cannot ensure that an applicant meets each of the eligibility requirements for enrollment in a [Qualified Health Plan] and when applicable, eligibility for insurance affordability programs.”

Nearly Half Of Total Obamacare Enrollees Cannot Be Verified As Eligible

What this implies is that the entire Obamacare program is nothing but a giant free-for-all, with absolutely no checks or balances in place to ensure that abuse and fraud don’t run rampant. Between abnormalities with income, employment verification and legal status in the U.S., it appears as though the bulk of Obamacare enrollees are either criminals, deadbeats or illegal aliens who don’t even belong in the country.

Of the roughly 8 million applicants who have signed up for Obamacare as of this writing, nearly 3 million of them cannot be verified by the current system as eligible, according to the HHS. And at this point in time, there is no way to ever verify them, as admitted by the Inspector General, further proving the massive swindle that has been levied on the American people by the Usurper-in-Chief who, ironically, has his own eligibility inconsistencies.

Four State-Run Exchanges Admit They Have No Way Of Verifying If Obamacare Enrollees Are Legal Citizens

Beyond the federal debacle, at least four state-run Obamacare exchanges are also incapable of verifying applicant eligibility. The HHS report explains that four of the 15 state marketplaces – Massachusetts, Nevada, Oregon and Vermont – haven’t figure out a way to resolve their “inconsistencies,” either. Much of this is due to their enrollment systems never having been designed with the capacity to verify applicants, a major oversight (or, perhaps, a deliberate design flaw).

Three other states – Hawaii, Colorado and Minnesota – have also had problems with inconsistencies. But these states sloughed the mess onto their state Medicaid offices, which are now having to individually verify each application by hand.

“One year ago, conservatives warned that the Obama administration’s decision to use the so-called ‘honor system’ for income eligibility was merely a backdoor way to get as many individuals on the public dole as possible,” wrote Wynton Hall for Breitbart about the ongoing dilemma. “The Office of Inspector General determined that ‘the federal marketplace was generally incapable of resolving most inconsistencies.’”

A devastating new Health and Human Services (HHS) Inspector General report released on Tuesday reveals that the Obama administration has yet to determine whether 1,295,571 of the over 8 million Obamacare enrollees are U.S. citizens lawfully in the country.

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The finding, located on page 11 of the report, states that 44% of the remaining 2,611,780 application “inconsistencies” are related to verifying “Citizenship/national status/lawful presence.” Another 960,492 application inconsistencies were related to verifying whether subsidy applicants provided accurate income information.

Moreover, the Inspector General report only covered the federal Obamacare exchanges to determine how the Obama administration resolved verification problems through December 2013. As for the 15 state-run Obamacare exchanges, the report says four–Oregon, Nevada, Vermont, and Massachusetts–are simply “unable to resolve inconsistencies.”

As the Washington Postreported in May, as many as one million Obamacare enrollees may be receiving incorrect taxpayer-funded subsidies due to Obamacare’s continued technical failures and inability to properly verify income and citizenship eligibility.

One year ago, conservatives warned that the Obama administration’s decision to use the so-called “honor system” for income eligibility was merely a backdoor way to get as many individuals on the public dole as possible.

The Office of Inspector General determined that “the federal marketplace was generally incapable of resolving most inconsistencies.”

Obamacare will cost U.S. taxpayers $2.6 trillion over the next ten years.

The inconsistencies may have resulted in individuals receiving an improper amount of subsidies, or subsidies that they shouldn’t have been eligible for in the first place – something that could require them to repay the money in future tax bills.

In other cases, inconsistencies led to bizarre outcomes. According to the report, “one marketplace cited situations in which infants and young children included on applications were erroneously identified as incarcerated.”

At issue is the information that individuals are asked to submit when they apply for coverage, such as income, citizenship status, Social Security number, or incarceration status. In theory, once data are submitted, they are supposed to be checked in a massive storage database known as the “hub,” which gathers data from multiple federal agencies.

“In some circumstances, the marketplace cannot verify an applicant’s information through available data sources,” the report explained. “When this happens, it is referred to as an inconsistency. This may arise when Federal data available through the Data Hub or data from other sources are unavailable or do not exist, or because the information on the application does not match the data received through the Data Hub or from other data sources.”

According to the HHS inspector general, applications submitted to the federal exchange in the opening months of Obamacare – October 2013 through December 2013 – contained over 2.9 million inconsistencies, of which more than 2.6 million, or 89 percent, remained unresolved as of Feb. 23, 2014.

To be clear, this does not mean that 2.9 million separate individual applications contained inconsistencies. Every applicant is prompted to answer a series of questions, and thus any given application can contain multiple inconsistencies. HHS could not provide data on the number of applications that included at least one, so there’s no way of saying what percentage of the total number of applications were affected. An inconsistency also doesn’t necessarily mean information is inaccurate, either, it just means it can’t be matched with available data.

The federal government has had an easier time resolving discrepancies related to Social Security numbers, while income and citizenship or lawful presence status have proven more challenging.

These numbers pertain only to the federal exchange that serve residents of 36 states, not the 15 states running their own exchanges.

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The HHS inspector general also received reports from 11 states running their own exchanges disclosing an additional 1.2 million inconsistencies, though the states could be counting differently and thus the federal and state numbers cannot be easily combined.

“During our review, 4 of the 15 State marketplaces reported that they were unable to resolve inconsistencies (Massachusetts, Nevada, Oregon, and Vermont),” the report read. “They attributed this inability to failures in their information technology systems.”

While the government is awaiting more documentation from individuals to resolve inconsistencies, those individuals are allowed to receive benefits for 90 days. However, according to the report, “because of the Federal marketplace’s inability to resolve most inconsistencies, we were unable to determine the number of applicants who may have exceeded the 90-day inconsistency period or for whom the inconsistency period was extended by the Federal marketplace because the applicant demonstrated a good-faith effort in obtaining satisfactory documentation.”

In a response, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said that most inconsistencies are still within the 90-day window, but that Obamacare gives the authority to the Secretary of HHS “to extend the 90-day inconsistency period for applications for coverage for 2014.”

The inspector general noted that resolving inconsistencies was considered a lower priority in the early months of the Obamacare rollout due to the pressing technical problems facing the website. But the report concluded that, “marketplaces must resolve inconsistencies to ensure that eligibility determinations for enrollment in (qualified health plans) and for insurance affordability programs are accurate.”

The report recommended that CMS “develop and make public a plan on how and by what date the Federal marketplace will resolve inconsistencies” and bolster oversight of state-based exchanges.

In its response, CMS said that the inconsistencies were to be expected.

“It is not surprising that there are inconsistencies between some information provided by application filers and the electronic data sources, and, in fact, this issue is addressed in the Affordable Care Act,” CMS wrote. “This is the first year that consumers have applied for coverage through the Marketplaces. Therefore, consumers are inexperienced with the eligibility process, which could lead to application mistakes.”

Some of the issues could be explained because different data is available, CMS said. “For example, the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) tax data is generally two years old (i.e., tax return information for 2012 is used to verify income attestations for coverage for 2014.),” according to CMS.

The few million inconsistencies represents a “small number” compared to the “hundreds of millions of possible data inconsistencies,” given that any application can contain over 20 different pieces of data.

CMS said it agreed with the inspector general’s recommendations and was continuing to resolve the inconsistencies – manually, at first, until it develops an automated system later in the summer.

Speaking at the United States Conference of Mayors on Friday, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said the approximately 11 million people who are in the country illegally have “earned the right to be citizens.”

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“An earned path to citizenship for those currently present in this country is a matter of, in my view, homeland security to encourage people to come out from the shadows,” said Johnson, in what he remarked was one of his first public speeches since being confirmed as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) chief in December.

“It is also, frankly, in my judgment, a matter of who we are as Americans,” he said, “to offer the opportunity to those who want to be citizens, who’ve earned the right to be citizens, who are present in this country – many of whom came here as children – to have the opportunity that we all have to try to become American citizens.”

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Johnson, who had earlier served as general counsel for the Department of Defense under Obama from 2009 to 2012, told the more than 270 mayors in attendance that enforcing immigration law was one of the main missions of DHS.

“The five core missions of the Department of Homeland Security are guarding against terrorism, securing our borders, enforcing our nation’s immigration laws, safeguarding cyberspace and critical infrastructure in partnership with the private sector, and supporting emergency preparedness and response efforts at every level,” Johnson said.

Then he concluded his remarks by calling for “comprehensive, common sense, immigration reform.”

“Common sense immigration reform is supported by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, businesses, and if the polls (are) to be believed, the majority of the American people,” Johnson said. “Border security is inseparable from homeland security.”

“And border security must and should be part of comprehensive immigration reform – protecting our borders, securing our ports, promoting the lawful flow of trade and travel through our ports to cities and other communities,” he said.

Johnson touted the alleged improvement in border security over the last four years and said comprehensive immigration reform also would increase that security.

“Comprehensive immigration reform would also promote a more effective and efficient system for enforcing our immigration laws, and should include an earned path to citizenship for the approximately 11-and-a-half-million undocumented immigrants present in this country, something like 86% of whom have been here almost 10 years,” Johnson said.

“An earned path to citizenship for those currently present in this country is a matter of, in my view, homeland security to encourage people to come out from the shadows, to be accountable, to participate in the American experience, the American society,” he said.

“It is also, frankly, in my judgment, a matter of who we are as Americans,” said Johnson. “To offer the opportunity to those who want to be citizens, who’ve earned the right to be citizens, who are present in this country – many of whom who came here as children – to have the opportunity that we all have to try to become American citizens.”

More immigrants facing deportation in immigration courts across the nation are having their court cases closed because of Obama’s prosecutorial discretion policy, researchers at Syracuse University found.

Meanwhile, the number of removal proceedings initiated in immigration courts by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has dropped since the new policy was implemented.

In fiscal 2013, immigration courts cited the exercise of “prosecutorial discretion” (PD) as the reason to dismiss 16,306 cases.

That is a 68 percent increase from the 9,684 cases that were tossed in 2012 for the same reason.

In total, from October 2011 when Obama’s discretion policy was implemented through December 2013, there were 28,983 PD-related closures in immigration courts across the U.S.

The number of deportations proceedings initiated in immigration courts by ICE has also dropped since Obama’s discretion policy was implemented.

In fiscal 2013, ICE initiated 190,277 removal proceedings in immigration courts, a 21 percent drop from the 239,504 in fiscal 2011, the year prior to the beginning of prosecutorial discretion.

Overall, the number of ICE removals has also dropped ten percent in 2013.

As a percentage of all cases closed, the number of prosecutorial discretion closures in court is also on the rise.

In fiscal 2013, 8.5 percent of all case closures were based on prosecutorial discretion, up from 4.7 percent the previous year.

Some immigration courts reported that prosecutorial discretion resulted in almost three out of every ten cases closed.

“The Seattle Court led the nation with 29.8 percent PD closures. The Tucson court was in second place with 26.0 percent PD closures, while the Los Angeles Court was third with 23.7 percent. Rounding out the top five were the Omaha Court at 23.1 percent and the Phoenix Court at 20.7 percent,” according to the Syracuse University analysis.

Houston saw one of the lowest percentages of case closures based on Obama’s policy.

Syracuse University researchers found that “Houston was at 1.7 percent PD closures, New York City 3.7 percent, Chicago 5.0 percent, and Miami 6.3 percent.”

The prosecutorial discretion closures mentioned in this report only refer to those cases that actually make it to court. Some immigration cases are dealt with administratively by the Obama administration.

John Morton, then-Obama’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement director, first announced the prosecutorial discretion policy in an October 2011 memo.

The new policy directed immigration enforcement officials to exercise “prosecutorial discretion” in deciding which illegal aliens to remove from the U.S.

According to the memo, the purpose of the policy was to remove the worst criminal offenders while allowing other aliens such as those who were brought into the country as children to remain in the country.

One purpose of the policy is to reduce a backlog of cases in immigration courts, according to the White House.

However, Syracuse University found that the policy is also being used to deal with new immigration court cases.

The White House has extended the use of prosecutorial discretion to immigration law violators who are military veterans and the spouses of active-duty military personnel.

Americans might generally think that if someone forges a document and uses a Social Security number that does not belong to them, they should go to jail.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., believes if you are an illegal alien and you do these things, you should become a U.S. citizen. He made his case for this in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

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When the committee was considering amendments to its immigration “reform” bill on May 20, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, pointed to a report published by The Associated Press in March.

This report told the story of Candida L. Gutierrez, a Houston schoolteacher, and Benita Cardona-Gonzalez, an illegal alien from Mexico who stole Gutierrez’s identity.

“When Gutierrez’s identity was stolen, the thief didn’t stop at opening fraudulent credit and bank accounts,” the AP reported. “Cardona-Gonzalez assumed Gutierrez’s persona completely, using it to get a job, a driver’s license, a mortgage and medical care for her children. She even put the stolen name on the birth certificates of her two U.S.-born children in the spots where they list who’s the mother.”

The identity theft went on for 12 years. Finally, Gutierrez’s husband, Brenden Marquardt, pushed the case.

“He traced the identity thief to Topeka, and on the Internet he found a press release from the U.S. attorney’s office in Kansas about the prosecutions of other illegal immigrants working at Reser’s Fine Foods, the same manufacturer where Cardona-Gonzalez worked,” the AP reported. “He contacted federal authorities in Kansas, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Brent Anderson took up their case.”

Cardona-Gonzalez, the AP reported, was sentenced to 18 months for possessing fraudulent identification documents. But other illegal aliens who have misused Social Security numbers will get something quite different if Schumer has his way.

After pointing to the victimization of Candida Gutierrez, Grassley explained to the Judiciary Committee a simple amendment he was offering to the immigration bill.

“The secretary (of homeland security) may not grant registered provisional immigrant status to an alien under this section unless the alien fully discloses to the secretary all the names and Social Security account numbers that the alien has ever used to obtain employment in the United States,” said Grassley’s amendment.

According to the immigration “reform” bill, a “registered provisional immigrant” (RPI) is an illegal alien who the secretary of homeland security has been authorized to convert into a legal alien, who can then work and live in the United States.

Grassley’s amendment would not have prohibited illegal aliens from being converted into legal aliens just because they had used names and Social Security numbers that did not belong to them. It would only have required that the illegal aliens make the names and numbers they used known to DHS before they could be granted the right to legally live in the United States.

“If Congress is going to adopt legislation that grants legal status to the 12 million undocumented living unlawfully in the United States, it should not thumb its nose at the millions of Americans who are victims of identity theft, often perpetrated by an undocumented person who steals Social Security numbers to get jobs, benefits, driver’s licenses and more,” said Grassley.

“This amendment will simply require the person applying for RPI status to disclose any previously used Social Security numbers,” said Grassley. “It’s the first step to helping clean up the mess that’s been created for the victim of identity theft. The amendment also authorizes certain federal agencies, upon receipt of this information, to notify individuals who were the victims.”

Schumer dismissed Grassley’s proposal.

“When people are living in undocumented status, there are times, I suppose, when they’ve made up identities, made up Social Security numbers,” Schumer told his Judiciary Committee colleagues. “How are they going to remember all that, and are we going to delay RPI status?

“(The) purpose of this is to bring people out of the shadows,” Schumer said of the “reform” bill. “We all know when they lived in the shadows, they had to forge documents, forge Social Security numbers, et cetera. We want to stop that once and for all so it never happens again. But this isn’t going to help. This is going to leave millions of people still in the shadows and not able to come out of the shadows and won’t solve the problem that we’re trying to solve, which is to have as few people here illegally as possible, put them on RPI, provisional status and then get them on a path to citizenship.”

“I just don’t see how, when you’ve lived here 10 years, and you’ve had many different identities, many different numbers, you’re going to remember them all,” said Schumer.

The committee defeated Grassley’s amendment 8 to 10 on a party-line vote.

As this column has noted before, the inspector general of the Social Security Administration reported in a 2008 audit report that U.S. employers filed 10.1 million W-2s in tax year 2005 on which the name and the Social Security number did not match. In that same year, 1,650 employers filed more than 500 no-match W-2s – and one employer filed 37,375.

Opponents of Colorado Senate President John Morse on Monday turned in more than 16,000 signatures demanding the Democratic leader’s recall. That’s more than twice the number required to trigger a special election that’s expected to be fought behind the scenes by national interests on both sides of the gun control debate.

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Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler has 15 days to certify that at least 7,178 of the signatures are valid for the recall election to proceed.

One of the main organizers of the effort told Denver’s 9News that she feels “very comfortable” meeting the threshold.

“With that much of a cushion, having half of them get tossed out, I’ve never seen that many be invalid,” Laura Carno, a political strategist, told the station.

Meanwhile, Morse and his supporters have charged that many of the signatures were gathered under false pretenses. The Denver Post reports that some of its readers said petitioners told them that Morse wanted to repeal Colorado’s “Make My Day” law, which immunizes homeowners from prosecution if they’re defending themselves against intruders.

In fact, Morse had proposed holding the owners, sellers and manufacturers of sporting rifles liable for any damage they cause, but he dropped the legislation before it could be voted on. Even a fellow Democrat called the proposal “absolutely nuts.”

Morse was the highest-profile Democrat in the state legislature supporting a wide range of gun control bills. Of seven bills that were introduced, five passed and will become law next month.

Morse can challenge the signatures in court, which he told 9News he was considering.

“Thousands of those signatures were obtained inappropriately,” Morse said. “Now, will we be able to prove that? We’ll have 15 days to figure that out. That’s going to be tricky.”

If petitioners have met the threshold, Morse can either go through with an election or he can resign and have the Democrats choose a replacement to serve out his term, an option he has said in the past he wouldn’t take.

An election will cost taxpayers about $150,000, El Paso County Clerk Wayne Williams told the Denver Post, but many expect the race to attract national attention and campaigning.

“It does look increasingly like Morse is going to be fighting for his political life, and Morse is almost a bit player in all this,” Denver political analyst Floyd Ciruli said in the Colorado Observer.

“It’s going to be national behemoths squaring off against each other in the form of [New York City Mayor Michael] Bloomberg and the NRA,” he said.

Just the news that Morse’s opponents are submitting signatures has garnered national comment.

In a statement released Monday, Michael Sargeant, the director of the Washington, D.C.-based Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee blasted Morse’s opponents as “extremists in Colorado [who] want to waste hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to recall Senator Morse, for the supposed ‘malfeasance’ of working to make his community safer.”

Morse is term- limited and ineligible to run again after 2014. Democrat Mike Merrifield, a former state representative and former state coordinator for Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns, has already filed paperwork to run for the seat. Speculation has been that if Morse chooses to resign rather than run in a special election, Merrifield would be the obvious replacement.

A Houston man was robbed at gunpoint as he made his way to his car after leaving a bar on Thursday. But in addition to the man’s wallet and phone, the robber ended up with bullet wounds and bite marks from a German Shepherd, thanks to a pair of quick-thinking good Samaritans.

Police say the armed thug was canvassing a local neighborhood when he thought he had found an easy mark. The victim, Kevin Dorsey, told KHOU that he hadn’t even closed his car door before a man, dressed in all black and wearing a ski mask, put a gun to his chest and demanded his wallet, cell phone and car keys.

Dorsey took off on foot after being robbed, prompting two men in a Mercedes to ask him what had happened.

“As soon as they pass me, they see the guy has a gun to me,” Dorsey told KPRC. “They stopped right there. The guys in the gray Mercedes asked me, ‘Did you just get jacked?’ I said yes.”

The two unidentified vigilantes went after the suspect and reportedly exchanged fire with the criminal. The good guys eventually won the gun fight and wounded the thief.

In a twist of irony, the robber jumped a fence after being shot in an attempt to escape – only to find a German Shepherd waiting for him on the other side. The dog attacked him and prevented him from escaping before police arrived.

“I don’t own a gun. I’m totally at the mercy of my saviors. They obviously sent two angels to help me. These people protected me when I couldn’t protect myself.”

The robbery suspect, later identified by police as Christopher Hutchins, was being treated at Ben Taub Hospital for a gunshot to his abdomen. He is expected to recover.

It’s unclear whether the two men who came to Dorsey’s rescue were concealed carry permit holders, however, reports do not indicate that police took any action against the men. In Texas, gun owners can carry firearms in their car without a concealed carry permit so long as the weapon is not concealed and the owner is not involved in criminal activity, a criminal street gang or otherwise prohibited by law from carrying a weapon.